Surveillance et détection des événements inhabituels en toxicovigilance : revue des méthodes pertinentes.

International audienceBACKGROUND: Declared cases of exposures related to potential toxic agents are reported through a national database, the French Network of Poison Centers, and account on average for 200,000 cases per year, including 75,000 to 80,000 symptomatic cases. These data are currently used to investigate signals from local, national or international institutional partners (such as hospitals, local health authorities, and the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed). Our objective is to complete this classical toxicovigilance activity through the automated detection of unexpected or unusual events in order to identify precociously signals representing potential threats for public health. To reach this objective, the inventory of surveillance and detection methods of unexpected events is necessary.METHODS: A literature review was conducted via Scopus(®) and Pubmed(®) databases, completed with grey literature and data available on worldwide vigilance systems' websites.RESULTS: The most commonly used methods are disproportional measures in the field of pharmacovigilance, some of which are subject to a routine detection at regular time intervals. Criteria of signal generation differ from one system to another, which have implemented data filtering strategies before or after analysis, in order to decrease the number of generated signals and improve their priority level. These signals are then transmitted to an experts committee for a clinical and epidemiological evaluation, and at times, for informing the patient's medical records. We also notice an interest in other approaches such as surveillance methods of temporal series or symbolic methods for associative rules extraction between one or more drugs and one or more adverse effects, with the possibility to include other types of variables, such a demographic data. The developments of probabilistic-based algorithms have also been recently developed, opening new opportunities.CONCLUSION: These surveillance and detection methods are of high interest for the automated detection of signals from the French toxicovigilance network. The initial step to developing these methods consists in studying the statistical quality of data and targeting the needs and expectations of the toxicovigilance network for what we want and what we can detect

N-3 fatty acids in patients with multiple cardiovascular risk factors

BACKGROUND: Trials have shown a beneficial effect of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in patients with a previous myocardial infarction or heart failure. We evaluated the potential benefit of such therapy in patients with multiple cardiovascular risk factors or atherosclerotic vascular disease who had not had a myocardial infarction. METHODS: In this double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, we enrolled a cohort of patients who were followed by a network of 860 general practitioners in Italy. Eligible patients were men and women with multiple cardiovascular risk factors or atherosclerotic vascular disease but not myocardial infarction. Patients were randomly assigned to n-3 fatty acids (1 g daily) or placebo (olive oil). The initially specified primary end point was the cumulative rate of death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, and nonfatal stroke. At 1 year, after the event rate was found to be lower than anticipated, the primary end point was revised as time to death from cardiovascular causes or admission to the hospital for cardiovascular causes. RESULTS: Of the 12,513 patients enrolled, 6244 were randomly assigned to n-3 fatty acids and 6269 to placebo. With a median of 5 years of follow-up, the primary end point occurred in 1478 of 12,505 patients included in the analysis (11.8%), of whom 733 of 6239 (11.7%) had received n-3 fatty acids and 745 of 6266 (11.9%) had received placebo (adjusted hazard ratio with n-3 fatty acids, 0.97; 95% confidence interval, 0.88 to 1.08; P=0.58). The same null results were observed for all the secondary end points. CONCLUSIONS: In a large general-practice cohort of patients with multiple cardiovascular risk factors, daily treatment with n-3 fatty acids did not reduce cardiovascular mortality and morbidity. Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society